A Synthetic Formulation of Nietzsche's Aesthetic Model

Nietzsche's philosophy in extenso may properly be appraised as a sustained endeavour to effect a creative sublation of Western ontology—and thus to nullify the latter's aesthetic Socratic basis—as a prerequisite toward the re-establishment of the instinct-affirming property of the post-Homeric/pre-Socratic Attic tragic paideia . Hence Nietzsche is compelled to investigate art's intrinsically twofold and ostensibly self-contradictory nature; namely, (i) its proclivity to metaphysically abstract Being and (ii) its capability to bring forth a context of ontological absence. Accordingly, paramount to his interest and analysis is his conception that art (in all its manifestations) is entirely and necessarily grounded in the dynamic interplay between the two primary, antithetical but not irreconcilable artistic impulses—(i) the Apollinian and (ii) the Dionysian. As he argues in the opening lines of The Birth of Tragedy (with the apparent conviction of a missionary for the “science of aesthetics”): “The continuous development of art is bound up with the Apollinian and the Dionysian duality—just as procreation depends on the duality of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations.”

Aesthetics · Art · Context (archaeology) · Epistemology · Literature · Metaphysics · Ontology · Paideia · Socratic method · Theology · Tragedy (event) · Education, Literature, Philosophy Research · German Literature and Culture Studies · History · Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel · Philosophy

• From The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

  Open Access•Friedrich Nietzsche•Princeton Sourcebook in…•2009

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